I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(63)

Also, when you interview someone, you have to sit very close to them in order to be in the same frame. It looks normal on TV, but in real life it feels like you’re invading each other’s personal space.

At the end of shooting an interview, there’s always an odd part of the process where the camera guys get right up next to us and shoot footage of our hands and faces. Each person is supposed to smile and nod as if listening to the other talk, but we can’t actually speak. We’re also supposed to make conversational hand gestures—clasping and unclasping, pointing, turning our palms up in a “so, you see . . .” kind of way. Then, when they’re editing the interview, they’ve got reaction shots of our hands and faces they can splice in wherever they need them. But this means that for about three minutes, we’re looking at each other and nodding, while folding and unfolding our hands, without saying a word. Again, looks great on TV, feels super-weird in real life.

I’ll never forget the time we had the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Elizabeth Strout on the show. I had decided that I’d make the hands-and-faces bit at the end more fun by putting on some music to fill the silence. Her latest book at the time was called Anything Is Possible, so I picked out a song by Ben Folds called “Capable of Anything.” Similar themes.

What I didn’t foresee was that by playing music I was making the moment not less uncomfortable, but much more so. It’s a surprisingly intimate experience to look into someone’s eyes at close range without speaking for the length of a song, not to mention a song about discovering the hitherto unknown depths of one’s soul. I realized almost immediately that I’d made the whole thing weirder, but once we were rolling, we couldn’t stop. So there we sat, so near to each other that our knees touched, gazing and nodding and hand-waving like mimes to a Ben Folds serenade. She was such a good sport—when the cameras stopped, she said, “Well, we just had a moment!”—but I felt like such a creeper for subjecting her to those three minutes.

Sometimes fighting the awkwardness just makes everything more awkward. Now I know.



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Making art—painting, singing, what have you—is never as easy as the final product makes it look. Take drawing, for instance. You might look at a picture of a dog and think, I’m going to draw a dog, too! And then as you attempt to draw a dog, you realize that this dog you’ve pictured in your mind isn’t quite coming across on paper. You might think, I want this shaggy dog to look friendly and whimsical. But when you put your pen to paper, you can’t figure out how to move your hand to make the ink convey friendly and whimsical. You have to concentrate on so many technical things: the right pressure to apply to make the fur look furry, the properly curved lines of the dog’s mouth, the proportion of legs to head to torso to tail. It doesn’t feel whimsical at all as you throw away your nineteenth try and start your twentieth drawing of that dog. These aren’t things the viewer thinks about, but they’re the things you have to do as the creator. You work, work, work on making something that will not feel at all like work in its consumption.

I knew this already about writing, but I had not yet learned it about television. In writing, you can go off and do the hard, technical work-stuff in sweatpants while hunched over a laptop for hours that turn into years, then step back, put on a clean dress, and hold the final, polished, packaged book out to readers. Ta-da!

When filming, you have to be the polished, packaged thing on camera AND you have to do the technical work of looking into the correct lens AND you have to talk and have a personality and listen and think and keep the conversation moving.

Writing has more phases; filming is all at once. But that’s why it’s nice to be allowed several takes.

Once to look into the right camera.

Twice to get the words right.

Three times to slow down and breathe normally.

Four times to forget all that and just talk.

You have to blink back the spell the camera casts on you, remember that you’re just a person sitting in a chair across from another person, having a chat. Do your preparation before, yes, but when the moment comes, let go. Don’t think about all the things that are happening at the same time. Surrender to the moment, be open to surprise, and follow where the conversation goes. This is what makes for a good show.



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I used to think that if only I could make everything perfect, then I could relax and have fun. If I could just eliminate all mistakes, my life would settle into place—click!—and my mind would rest. If I’m being truthful, I have to acknowledge that on some unchangeable, deep-down level, there’s still a part of me that thinks that. I’m still a first grader at a spelling bee, thinking that what matters more than anything is that I get every single word right.

But by now, I’ve built up a crowd of selves who can set that little girl at ease. It’s okay, they tell her. Mistakes will happen—they have happened—and it’s not the end of the world. They get her to loosen up a little. They help her see that doing things wrong is part of doing life right. They show her that joy is bigger than fear. It can even be funny when things go haywire.



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So scratch the thing about never getting a facial before recording a television show. I mean, don’t get the pre-TV facial—it’s a bad idea. But if you’re going to take just one thing from this story, let it be something much more important: